The A's Out-Hit the Nationals and Lost 5-2, Because of Course They Did

Twenty-four hours after hanging 15 on Washington, this team out-hit the Nationals eleven to seven and lost the series at home anyway. Eleven hits. Two runs. I need somebody to explain this franchise to me like I am five.

On Saturday, the A's beat the Washington Nationals 15-1. Fifteen to one. JT Ginn took a no-hitter into the seventh, three guys homered, and for one shining evening it looked like the most schizophrenic team in baseball had remembered how to hit. So naturally, on Sunday, with a home series win sitting on a tee at Sutter Health Park, the same lineup showed up, collected ELEVEN hits, and scored two runs in a 5-2 loss that handed Washington the series. Eleven hits, two runs. This team scored 15 runs on Saturday and could not scrape together three on Sunday against a starter they had just spent two days treating like batting practice equipment. I have been watching this franchise my whole life and I still cannot explain a single thing it does.

Let me lay out the crime, because the box score is genuinely insulting. The A's put the leadoff domino in motion early and tied the game 1-1 in the third when Tyler Soderstrom singled home a run. Fine. Good. Normal baseball. From that point on, this offense spent the entire afternoon jogging to first base and then dying there. Shea Langeliers had two hits. Jacob Wilson had a hit with a runner in scoring position in the ninth, when the game was already in the coffin, to make it 5-2. Add it all up: eleven hits, a parade of baserunners, and exactly two of them ever touched home plate. The Nationals had SEVEN hits all day, four fewer than we did, and won by three, because when they got their runners on, they cashed them in with actual damage instead of leaving them to rot at first base.

And the damage, when it came, was a mugging. Lopez was quietly excellent for the A's, striking out six over four and a third innings and allowing exactly two hits, and his reward was a loss that dropped him to 4-4 because his teammates gave him one run of support and his bullpen dumped gasoline on his exit. The moment he was lifted in the fifth, the game died. CJ Abrams got hold of one and sent it 422 feet to center with a man on, and before the crowd could even sit back down, Dylan Crews went back-to-back with a solo shot to left. Three runs in the inning, 5-1, series over in the span of about ninety seconds. Two hits allowed by your starter should be a winning afternoon every single time. Around here it is just another way to lose.

Meanwhile the other guy, Griffin, improved to 11-2, and I want you to think about how that happened. This is the same Nationals staff the A's just hit for 15 runs on Saturday, in a series where Washington had already hung a 23-4 humiliation on us in the opener. This series produced final scores of 23-4, 15-1, and 5-2. Fifty runs scored in three games, and the one that decided the series was the quiet one, the one where the A's left their bats in the tunnel. Griffin threw seven innings of one-run ball with two strikeouts. TWO strikeouts. He was not overpowering anybody. He just kept throwing it over the plate and letting the A's hit harmless singles and then strand themselves into oblivion, inning after inning after inning.

Here is the standings picture, and it hurts more than it should. The A's are 42-57, eight games behind Texas in the AL West, playing in front of 9,088 people in a minor league park in Sacramento while the franchise waits for Las Vegas. Nine thousand and eighty-eight. The Nationals climbed to 50-50 on our dime, and their kids, Abrams and Crews, looked like exactly the kind of dangerous, ascending core the A's keep telling us they are building while never actually finishing the job. We have the young bats. Soderstrom is legit. Langeliers made the All-Star team. Wilson can hit. And none of it matters on the days this team collectively forgets that the entire point of a baserunner is to bring him home.

The maddening thing is that the talent is visibly there. You do not hang 15 on a big league team by accident. You do not out-hit an opponent 11-7 by accident either. The 2026 A's are not a bad baseball team, they are an unserious one, a team that treats run-scoring like a mood that comes and goes instead of a skill you show up with every day. Saturday they were the best offense in baseball. Sunday they were a beer league team that happened to rent the stadium. Until somebody in that clubhouse or that front office figures out how to make the Saturday version show up more than once a week, this franchise will keep doing exactly what it did this afternoon: pile up hits, strand a small village on the bases, lose winnable series at home, and send 9,088 die-hards back to the parking lot wondering why they keep doing this to themselves. I know the feeling. I will be back Tuesday anyway. Somebody has to witness this.

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